Companies that have distributed or Web-based applications often have a variety of tools that collect data about the performance of these applications. Specifically, tools are used to measure the end-user response time of the applications, along with multiple metrics on the Web servers, application servers, databases, and the physical servers that host the applications or application components. Metric data collected includes CPU utilization, disk I/O rates, TCP transmission errors, etc. The challenge is that given an application performance problem perceived (or potentially perceived) by a user of an application, how can the cause of the problem be quickly identified given the potentially overwhelming amount of metric data that has been collected.
Performance management tools generally provide reports on the metrics being collected, but they do not automatically show the software services, metrics, hardware devices and other computing infrastructure related to the application experiencing a particular problem. The user is forced to manually sift through volumes of data with the required a prior knowledge of how the applications and services are related.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide an improved method for identifying a cause of a performance problem experienced by an application in a computing environment. To help the user find and isolate the problem quicker, the method proposes a unified performance analysis report that presents the most likely indicators of the source of the performance problem. The report should show not only the current value of the metrics for the software services used by the application, but also a chart of the metric values over time since it is often the change in a metric that indicates a problem. In order to see more data at one time, each metric chart should show multiple software services that have that type of metric. This will help to address the situation where a company has, for example, 100 servers with 10 metrics each. Each metric chart should also include an indicator for the state of service for the application. This will help the user correlate metrics from multiple sources to the time period in which the application experienced a problem. The state of service indicator for the application may be displayed in a heat chart format along with the metric charts.
This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art